00:01Further north of Broken Hill, places like Tiburbarra, which are about 300 kilometres
00:06away, they're basically cut off for the time being. There's really only one road in and
00:11out and that the creek has flooded. The creeks have flooded along that road and so they're
00:16cut off completely. Other places like White Cliffs as well, further north east of Broken
00:22Hill, they've received over 70 millimetres overnight. These falls are quite significant
00:28considering the fact that places like White Cliffs, the council was already, was in the
00:33process of planning to cart in water, just considering how dry it has been. And so as
00:39you can see, Broken Hill, it's raining quite a bit at the moment for the time being. It
00:44hasn't had the falls that we've seen in other places, which have been some places more than
00:48200 millimetres. So it hasn't quite seen that here yet. We've got sort of five to ten over
00:54the last couple of days and hopefully we expect to see that increase. People are much happier
01:02considering how dry it's been. Broken Hill received around 60 millimetres of rain in the
01:06previous six months before this rain came in. So that just goes to illustrate how dry it's
01:12been. And then you combine that with the hot summer temperatures. We had a week that was
01:15over 45 degrees every day in Broken Hill and hotter in other parts of the far west of New
01:20South Wales. So the combination of those things and your viewers may have seen or may remember
01:25that just storm that came in quite significant a few weeks ago as well, that kind of illustrates
01:30just how dry it is again. Speaking to the Broken Hill mayor, along with a local grazier,
01:37Dennis Mannion, they suggested, well, they sort of tried to give an insight into what this might
01:44mean economically for the region as well. Despite people being cut off, the rain really will
01:50help graziers and the community considering a lot of them were getting rid of all of their
01:53stock before this happened. So have a listen to what they had to say.
01:57When the pressure's off to have to supply feed and water for your properties, there's going
02:02to be a lot of money spent in town because there's just so much relief from the fact that
02:07there's water and there's such a significant amount of rain, it'll refill groundwater as well.
02:13So some new stock will start to restock. We'll be able to bring some of the remaining stock
02:20home from adjustment or probably all of them now.
02:25There we go. As you heard there from the Broken Hill mayor, Tom Kennedy and Dennis Mannion, the
02:31grazier, significant falls and it's going to have a really positive impact on the region.
02:36Of course, there is some negatives. As I mentioned, Tibivarra, places like that are cut off completely.
02:40The SES have brought out two helicopters, which will be helping locals if they need to resupply stocks,
02:46as the creeks will likely run for around a week and people on even more remote stations where
02:53there's dirt roads exclusively, they might be sort of cut off for even longer. But as I mentioned,
02:59there's plenty more money in mud than dirt. So people are pretty happy as a general rule.
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